`Love' a Gripping Portrait of Morbid Painter Bacon / Derek Jacobi stars in film about artist and his raffish lover

Bob Graham, Chronicle Staff Critic

Published 4:00 am, Friday, October 9, 1998

LOVE

IS THE DEVIL: Drama. Starring
Derek Jacobi
and
Daniel Craig
. Directed by
John Maybury
. (Not rated. 90 minutes. At the Embarcadero in San Francisco, the Guild in Menlo Park, Act 1 in Berkeley and the Camera in San Jose.)
Let's just call this one, for starters, "The Undeceived."

The description applies both to the gnarly subject -- the great and greatly flawed English painter Francis Bacon -- and to the film's unblinking view of him.

The new BBC film, based on the painter's relationship with a burglar-turned-model, is actually called "Love Is the Devil." Like Bacon's own work, it is not a pretty picture.

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The film is true to Bacon's bleak view of the world, in which horror and pleasure occupy the same territory, and it showcases a brave and unflinching performance by Derek Jacobi. It is a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged nihilist, and it is a totally absorbing experience.

Bacon, in his paintings, viewed humans as tortured and anguished, and compared them to slabs of meat. He said he had no shame, as an artist, about the "dark rooms" in his life, and Jacobi does not back away from bringing them into the light and showing them to us. One of the early shots in the film shows him sniffing the pillow where his lover has lain.

The action takes place in London in the '60s and early '70s. Bacon first encounters petty criminal George Dyer (Daniel Craig) as Dyer is ransacking his studio. The painter immediately sizes up the intruder and tells him, "Take your clothes off." It is the beginning of a relationship in which Dyer's personality will disintegrate in proximity to Bacon's blazing star.

The trajectory recalls another contemporary pair of doomed lovers, playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell (in Stephen Frears' "Prick Up Your Ears"), except that both Orton and Halliwell were part of the working class and Bacon crossed class lines for "rough trade" partners.

As Dyer, Craig has the profile and calves of a rugby player. He is adrift among Bacon's cynical and bitchy friends, and is reduced to drunkenly passing along, to rent boys, Bacon's observations as his own.

Tilda Swinton ("Orlando" and "Edward II") is almost unrecognizable as the sharp- tongued proprietor of a drinking club Bacon frequents. Here we see world-weary people being nasty to one another, and the place seems to provide evidence of Bacon's dim view of humanity.

"I love it when it's just you and me," Dyer tells Bacon, who replies, "The only way, George." We have to believe that their intense physicality, in which the otherwise cruelly honest and manipulative Bacon turns masochistic, is a world apart for them.

Bacon is drawn to blood sports, boxing and bullfighting, because they "unlock the valves of feeling" -- there is an extraordinary shot of Jacobi at ringside splattered with blood. When Bacon is arrested after a police raid for evidence of drug use, he drily asks the constable, "Would you like to handcuff me?"

Jacobi, an esteemed classical actor (Claudius in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet"), is completely focused on every demand the role makes of him. Twice we see Bacon painting his face, once when he applies a touch of makeup before going out, and later when, angrily painting a self-portrait, he smears on blue and ocher pigment.

Director John Maybury finds distorted, blurred images like Bacon's in ashtrays and mirrors, and he may make too much of other equivalents of the painter's imagery. Bacon did not paint from life -- he preferred to use photographs and other existing images -- and it is tempting to say that he painted from death, if that doesn't sound too glib.

Although it occurs during the same period, this is as far away from "swinging London" as it's possible to get, and Maybury knows it. There is a wicked glimpse of the young painter David Hockney portrayed as a popinjay in a white suit.